Weekly Shooting Excursion XI: Archer Avenue, Bridgeport

For my 11th summer shooting excursion, I shot on and around Archer Ave. in the south side Chicago Bridgeport neighborhood. Bridgeport is an interesting neighborhood with an interesting (although not always nice) history. I’ll save that for a later post; I returned to the central area of Bridgeport for a shoot in early September (the one I’m posting today was in late July), and will touch on history when I get around to posting about that shoot. The Archer Ave. area feels different from the rest of the neighborhood anyway, so I’ll focus on the Archer area now.

Bridgeport these days is one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the city. Nearly 40% of the population in Bridgeport is Asian, and Chinatown sits immediately to the northeast of where I was shooting. Archer Ave. is one of the infamous diagonal streets in Chicago, and for much of it’s length, is paralleled by the I-55 expressway as it runs out to the southwest suburbs from the city center. It’s an arterial street, and I’d bet that most Chicagoans’ only experience with Archer comes from using it as an alternate route when I-55 is a gridlocked nightmare.

Where it runs through Bridgeport, Archer is pretty grubby and run down looking in places, but the area doesn’t feel grubby. Bridgeport for years has had a kind of simmering under the surface, almost gentrifying, almost hipsterish feeling, but not quite. The people who were out in the streets when I was shooting were mainly a mixture of young adults and middle aged Asians, and the area felt, if not quite vibrant, stable and calm (traffic aside). I walked along Archer for maybe a mile and a half, popping down side streets when things looked interesting. The cloud cover was steadily increasing while I was shooting, and on my way back home, some strong storms blew through. Here are my favorite shots.

Mosaic made from three separate shots with a 4-lens Nishika camera.
 

Weekly Shooting Excursion X: West Loop

This is my tenth ‘get out of the house and go shoot something’ excursion.  I was on a roll with these shoots by now, and usually slipped into ‘photographer mode’ pretty easily when out on these day trips. This shoot was in mid-July, and while it was definitely hot, it wasn’t excruciatingly hot and humid as it was for the previous few shots. On the edge of unpleasant, but manageable. 

I chose the West Loop for this shoot. This is the area directly west of Chicago’s downtown core (the Loop to locals). The West Loop is an interesting neighborhood, and one that feels completely different than it did when I moved to Chicago 22 years ago. Back in the late 90’s, it was at the beginning stages of gentrification, and still more grubby than polished. It’s an old meatpacking district, and the aging warehouse buildings made good, inexpensive studio space for artists. Artists moving in led to galleries opening, and for several years the area was the home for the newer, more daring gallery scene in town (there are still galleries left, but the new, hot gallery scene is shifting again to an area northwest of the West Loop known as West Town). Condo conversions were next, then the establishment of restaurant row, a stretch of Randolph St. that’s home to several of the best known and highest rated fine dining establishments in the city. Oprah Winfrey’s studios were in the area when her tv show was in production (the lot where her studios were is now McDonald’s world headquarters). The latest addition to the area is several new high rise residential towers, replacing low rise warehouse buildings. It’s now considered one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city. A few meatpacking places and warehouses still exist there, but the vibe is more upscale urban than grungy light industrial these days.

Given how much it’s changed, it’s a surprisingly pleasant neighborhood. The side streets are pretty quiet, and while the new condo buildings aren’t as attractive as the old warehouses, it’s still a nice place to wander. It feels a lot like Chelsea in New York, although less self consciously trendy. I don’t get to this area often anymore, I used to hit the galleries every month when the exhibits changed, but haven’t done that in several years. I also have a good friend whose painting studio was in this area, on the third floor of a crumbling building that housed an industrial machine repair service on the first floor (that building is now gone, replaced by one of the newest residential skyscrapers in the neighborhood). Walking around and shooting was enjoyable, and because I hadn’t spent much time there in quite a while, with all it’s changes it felt like a brand new place.

I must have found the area photogenic, as this was my longest shoot so far, and also the one where I shot the most photos. Going through them all took much longer than expected. 

Here are my favorites:

 

Weekly Shooting Excursion IX: Beverly, Western Ave.

The next installment in my weekly escape the house photo shoots wasn’t as lengthy or involved as most of the others I’d done, mainly because it was way too hot and humid to spend several hours out shooting. The entire week had temperatures in the mid to upper 90’s with 80% or higher humidity. Really uncomfortable weather, and so hot that even doing something pretty low key like walking around shooting photos could risk heat exhaustion. I kept putting off going out, and while I got a lot of work done for the upcoming Fall semester, really wanted to to shoot. I finally went out on Friday, but cut things short by limiting my shoot to walking for a mile up Western Ave, in the Beverly neighborhood on the far southwest side of Chicago.  It’s close to home, and the mile I walked along Western was a shorter distance than I’d covered on most of my earlier walks. It was still nasty hot and uncomfortable, but I carried water, wore lots of sunscreen, and wasn’t out for a long time.

Beverly is kind of an interesting neighborhood. There’s a lot of big, old, well maintained homes along tree lined streets there, and it has just a bit of a suburban feel while retaining an urban neighborhood vibe. It’s also known for being one of the more integrated neighborhoods in Chicago, and for having one of the lowest crime rates in the city. It’s maybe not the most exciting neighborhood, but it’s pleasant, safe, and comfortable.

Western Ave. is one of the big north/south arterial streets in Chicago, running the entire length of the city and into the suburbs. It cuts right through Beverly, where it’s mostly the same sort of business district you find in neighborhoods anywhere near the edge of a city, with lots of medical and insurance offices, service businesses, fast food, etc. Some of the buildings have a cool mid-century vibe, not too different from the types of buildings I found when shooting in suburban Oak Lawn a couple weeks earlier.

Here’s my favorite shots from this hot, sticky photo shoot.

Shot with a Nishika N800 4-lens film camera

Shot with a Nishika N800 4-lens film camera 

Weekly Shooting Excursion VIII: Small Town Mid-Michigan

My eighth weekly photo shoot was quite different from the others I’ve done this summer. I visited my sister, who lives outside of the small Michigan village I grew up in, over July 4th weekend. She was at the tail end of a five week long furlough from her job, and I had been socially isolating as well, so we discussed it and realized we both felt safe having me visit.

The town I grew up near is in the middle of mid-Michigan farm country, miles away from anything. There’s really nothing much at all to do, which makes for a relaxing change of pace, as I’ve lived in Chicago for over twenty years now. It also means that I can’t shoot the things I usually do, but I always bring a camera when I visit, and spend some time just wandering in and around her large yard shooting the foliage and rural scenes. It was baking hot and humid the entire weekend, so I didn’t even do a lot of that, but did manage some decent shots. Most of them are variations on a bit of foliage isolated against a blurred out background, and I don’t shoot that type of photo often, so it’s fun to revisit that shooting technique.

I also accompanied my sister for a quick trip into town, just a couple miles away, and shot some photos while she was running a quick errand. The town is so small I was able to cover the entire main street business district (such as it is) in less than ten minutes!

Here’s the best of what I shot.

 Shot with a 4-lens Nishika N8000 film camera.

Weekly Shooting Excursion VII: Oak Lawn

My seventh weekly photo shoot was kind of a mini shoot, for a couple of reasons. First, I was pretty busy getting things ready for my Fall semester classes, which are being taught entirely online. There is a staggering amount of prep work involved in designing an online class, I’d even say that the prep work is more difficult and time consuming than actually teaching online. Second, the beautiful weather I had for last week’s shoot had been replaced with sweltering heat and high humidity, which we seem to have had more than our fair share of in Chicago this summer. I hate hot, humid weather, and I tend to get dehydrated pretty easily, so while I really wanted to go shooting someplace, I was procrastinating it.

My solution to this mini-dilemma was leaving an hour early for my annual eye exam. My eye doctor is in Oak Lawn, a southwest Chicago suburb. I don’t often shoot in the suburbs, and generally find the urban environment closer to my personal aesthetic, but I also love mid-century architecture, and knew there was a bit of that a few blocks from the eye doctor’s office. So, I combined shooting with the appointment, and spent an hour shooting along busy, 6-lane Cicero Avenue. 

It worked out nicely. While I didn’t shoot as much as I have been on these weekly excursions, I did enjoy the dated, 60’s vibe to the buildings. Shooting also distracted me from the bit of nagging worry in the back of my head. A quick haircut aside, this was my first real one on one interaction I’d had with someone outside of immediate family since the pandemic lockdown over three months earlier. It was fine, by the way. The eye doctor’s office handled things very professionally and had a distancing plan in effect.

One additional difference, in addition to my digital camera, I also shot with a junk camera. I was doing quite a bit of shooting with cheap, vintage and modified film cameras about ten years ago, but hadn’t used any of them for a few years. I had recently uncovered a box of expired 35mm film buried in my studio closet, and decided to start using them again. For this shoot, I brought a Nishika N8000, a really crappy camera with four lenses designed to shoot lenticular photos. 

Here’s the best of this mini shoot.

Shot with a Nishika N8000 4-lens camera.

Shot with a Nishika N8000 4-lens camera.

Shot with a Nishika N8000 4-lens camera.

 Gif of the above image, showing the 3D effect the 4 lenses give.